Various optical lens systems have been used over the years for different purposes. For instance, some lens systems provide for magnification of an image while other lens systems provide for zooming in on an image. Lens systems can also be used for various applications and/or in different environments. For example, a lens system may be part of a digital camera and the user may wish to zoom in on objects that are far away in order to obtain images of these objects or to focus on objects that are close. In other examples, the lens system may be part of a camera in a cellular phone or other small electronic device where the user desires to obtain nearby images.
While various types of lens systems have been employed in various applications, these previous systems suffered from several disadvantages. To take one example, due to the desired miniaturization of systems, system components need to be as small as possible. Unfortunately, previous systems had components that were bulky and miniaturization became difficult to accomplish. Previous systems also often used a wide variety of moving parts that frequently moved along an axis of the lens system. Unfortunately, these moving parts had a tendency to break requiring the replacement of system components and leading to the unreliability of these previous approaches. These systems also utilized a large number of parts and this also added to the unreliability (and cost) of these approaches. For all these reasons, previous systems were costly to produce and user satisfaction with these systems was often negatively impacted by the above-mentioned disadvantages.
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